Certificates and Courses

In this course, we argued that this is partly because modern production is complex and requires the combination of many different capabilities such as know-how, tools, inputs, regulations, etc. we learned basic concepts of economic complexity, their analysis and policy implications.

Starting from a definition of technology, we developed a simple combinatorial (‘scrabble’) production theory in a complex world and discussed its implications and empirical support. We showed how we can derive from the theory measures of country and product complexity and how these measures can inform our understanding of economic development.

Then, we consider network analysis: Using the ‘product space,’ a network that connects products with similar capability requirements, as our guiding example, we argued that networks are powerful tools to visualize and analyze complex systems. We learned basic concepts in data visualization and dimensionality reduction and their implementations in Python.

The course concluded with giving an overview of advanced topics and discussing policy implications for economic development as well as open research questions in these areas.